Thoughts on book publishing, editing, contemporary poetry, dementia, administrative memos, and teaching by the editor of Tinfish Press.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Simone Weil 4

Love is not
consolation; it is light. Neither
is quite noun, or verb.
Noun, Verb,
and Period
sat in a bus headed for Nanakuli. Noun was such a dull one that Verb
fell asleep, missing his stop. The bus driver wasn't inclined to stop
where there was no sign, but Period pulled her authority card and put
an end to that. Consolation is a lightening, but not yet light. The
green flash happens in the morning, too, when sun edges through a
hole in the Pacific. Light can be abject,
like a comma, or it can be
voice, lifting comma like an early moon. My son's eyebrow covers his
eyelid like thatch. His eye inhabits the photograph but what it sees
is not I nor you nor any thing, but something past the provenance of
the lens. We can see an eye, but not its seeing. We
can see through light, but we can't see it. Pronoun, only slightly
more scintillating than Noun, missed the bus all together. She rests
in the empty space of a semi-colon's rustled bed sheets, shifting her
gender. My former student is now a “he,” and that sheds some
light on who she seemed to me. It is only if the light is empty that
it works.